"Programming is hard. Don't ever feel bad because you aren't as good at 'just googling it' as the person next to you. Don't ever let hackathon snobs talk you out of creating the next Twitter for cats or Yelp for public washrooms. Even the dumbest ideas (like trying to make animated polygons disappear and reappear) will help you improve as a programmer. Learning to program is largely about learning to learn - and the best way to learn is to do." For some reason, I love this short story.

Best way to learn to learn is to go to university. They have plenty of stuff for your brain to chew. Programming just takes a good use of that skill.

I disagree.

I learned more in six months of programming C++ with a specific goal in mind than I did with three years of programming in school.

The teachers either weren't knowledgeable enough, or they had to teach to the capabilities of the students - which was FAR below my level.

I learned html in a week, but that would take a year in college - and they wouldn't teach you how to do it manually - they had you use some stupid WYSI*N*WYG editor... and the site then only worked in IE.

Javascript took a little longer (I love JQuery ;-)) - maybe two weeks. PHP took about two days to be productive - but I still haven't mastered it (my use case has changed towards something akin to AJAX).

However, some people are unable to learn on their own... The internet has made things FAR easier.